Porcupine
by Writings of Stardust
Summary: Grant Ward is a porcupine and everyone knows it (especially Commander Hill). So why is it that whenever Skye starts coming close, she never gets stuck with any quills? Introspective one-shot on Ward and Skye from 1x01 to 1x07. Pre-Skyeward.


Grant Ward is not a people person, and though he can sometimes charm information out of a suspect, he has much better luck using manipulation and intimidation tactics. He's a loner and prefers it that way, so when he's told to work on a team? Unabashedly, he tries to weasel his way out of it. Coulson won't hear any of it, and although Commander Hill is convinced that Ward will get along with a team about as well as oil gets along with water, she is absolutely _not_ helpful to his cause. In fact, she's rather detrimental to it, despite her apt description of his people skills as "porcupine."

Skye is playful. Like, _annoyingly_ playful, and it gets on half of the team's nerves, lightens the mood in the lab, and – on a few occasions – makes the people nearby alarmingly uncomfortable.

Ward wasn't expecting _her_ when they picked up a Rising Tide hacker. He wasn't entirely sure what a Rising Tide hacker was supposed to be like once they were taken prisoner and interrogated about a super-powered mutant, but she definitely wasn't supposed to be peppering her test of the sodium pentathol with teasing, joking questions ranging from his grandmother to his crush on his classmate when he was fifteen. Yes, she asked other things, but those didn't surprise him. It was her tendency to take things lightly that irked him almost as much as her chosen profession.

Coulson decided to adopt her into the folds as a consultant. Ward thought she was more like a pet, but she was a cute one, and she hadn't had particularly malevolent intentions, so he decided he'd make sure she survived to the best of his ability. He assigned himself as her SO – a title which Skye found amusing – and began training her up to be strong. Skye wasn't a very experienced fighter. Hell, she nearly broke her hands boxing the wrong way, and he mentally shuddered to imagine what would've happened if he wasn't as attentive a workout partner. These things aside, she showed promise, and she was strong. What she lacked physically she made up for in spirit, and some of the best fighters Ward had ever trained with had been smaller than him, anyway. They'd just learned how to capitalize upon the advantages they _did_ have.

The problem with Skye was that she never turned off her playfulness. She scowled and used a deep, mocking voice while he wrapped her hands to protect them while throwing punches. She called him dumb nicknames when she saw him working up a sweat and beating some training equipment to within an inch of its life. When he took her to the shooting range to teach her how to use a gun most efficiently, she made cartoony gunshot noises every time she pulled the trigger and seemed delighted when she hit the target, even if it was a nonfatal shot.

If Coulson wanted to make an agent out of her, Skye would have to learn to stow the jokes and the humor for long enough to be serious. At least she had the survival sense to only refer to May as Uma Thurman one time before she gave it up and never tried it again.

Skye got along best with Fitzsimmons, which didn't really surprise Ward, but she was _his_ trainee, not theirs. Unless the lab rats learned to speak laymen's English in either of their respective fields, Ward could teach her more than they could, and faster, too. If she wanted to be in the field, she needed to know some self-defense, and he strongly suspected that Fitz couldn't defend himself against an unarmed, blind, one-legged enemy. Simmons could probably be taught some self-defense, but she preferred biochemistry to physical exertion, and her strength laid in the lab. It always had. That was why she hadn't gone to Operations instead of the SHIELD science academy.

Fitzsimmons let her make her jokes. They enjoyed them when they understood them, and they didn't scold her for it even when they didn't. Coulson let her have her laughs. He'd gone soft and had an even softer spot for the hacktivist, though at least most of the time he didn't think her jokes were all that funny. Skye didn't shut up around May, exactly, but May was rarely the subject of her humor. May intimidated most of the younger SHIELD associates, and Skye wasn't an exception.

Ward was the only one who held her to the expectations that he'd hold a partner to. He cut her some slack. He knew that he could take her out in a heartbeat and she wouldn't stand a chance. He was fair. But she was an adult, and SHIELD was serious, and not having the right mindset in the field could get herself and those around her killed. If no one else was going to teach her that, then he would, even if it meant he had to be a little hard on her.

Still, Skye called him the name of every monotonous or robotic character he knew of, as well as several that he didn't, and she made many complaints when he woke her up at six to teach her more. He took his responsibilities as her SO very seriously. One day, she would thank him. Or not. Whatever. It didn't matter; he had a job and she was now part of it.

* * *

When they found the 084, Skye asked if it was going to be from an alien. There was a time when Ward would've scoffed at her, told her to be real, but with everything that had been happening in the last so many years on Earth, everyone at SHIELD knew better. Captain America was alive seventy years after his supposed death, a quiet, soft-spoken scientist could transform into a huge green monster, and a giant portal had opened over the middle of New York for a fleet of aliens to spill out of. Same old, same old. Asgardians could come sailing down to help out or to destroy New Mexican towns whenever they liked. 084s being alien? Well, Ward would've been more surprised if Skye had managed to understand the science jargon spilling from Fitzsimmons' lab like a chemical hazard.

Playing the _X-Files_ theme song from her phone was uncalled for. Simmons looked down and tried not to show that her grin was spreading, threatening to make her laugh, and Fitz shook his head, exasperated but a little fond. Skye grew on them. Skye grew on everyone on the bus, except for maybe May.

And Ward, obviously. He was immune to whatever fungus-like properties she had that allowed her to stick to people who didn't particularly want her around to begin with. That was what he told himself, and he had never been wrong about himself in the recent past. If he didn't need someone, then he didn't need them. Wanting someone was different, yes, but he had no reason to want Skye, a hacker for an organization that would expose SHIELD and ruin hard work that he'd had a part in securing.

From there, everything escalated. First, they were all going to be shot by rebels, but then it was okay, because they weren't rebels at all, and their boss was a friend of Coulson's. Next, the _actua_ l rebels showed up, and Ward did what he wasn't trained specifically to do, per se, but what he never had any intention of _not_ doing: he protected his team.

He preferred to work alone. It was easier that way. Safer, too, in some respects. But he hadn't been given much of a choice. He'd been given this team, and it was his job to be loyal to SHIELD, to his teammates, and so he defended the lab rats and Skye, guiding them when it was safe, ushering them behind cover.

When he felt a bullet pierce his side, ripping a hole through his thick jacket and his dark-colored shirt, he ground his teeth and didn't say anything. Calling out would've given them away, stolen attention away from their escape and onto his health. He'd felt much worse. A bullet? _Please._ He could feel it wasn't fatal, though it hurt in a way that he'd almost forgotten.

Skye saw the blood when they got back to the Bus (ridiculous name, really, since it was actually a giant plane) and after cracking a joke about literal blood on his hands – the kind of witty, tongue-in-cheek, half-political and half-humanitarian thing that he would've expected from a Rising Tide member – she realized that the blood was coming from him, and it was one of the first times he'd seen her be serious without threat of death hanging over her head. Some of the color drained from her face and he had to argue to keep her hands off of him.

"I'm fine," he insisted, shoving her hands away before she could pull up his shirt and get a good look. He'd stitched himself up before; he could do it again. There were supplies and local anesthetic in the medical center on board. "Part of the job. Go help Reyes' guys."

He was brisk and curt, and the worry didn't leave her eyes, but Skye backed off, and he almost regretted being short with her. Ward thought about apologizing, just for a moment, when it seemed like she was making the first attempt to build a bridge they probably should've tried to lay the foundation for as soon as they knew she would be sticking around. Before he could decide whether or not to do it, much less act on it, he saw the signaling of a couple of Reyes' soldiers, and in less than a second, he was no longer Skye's not-quite-friend-or-something; he was back to being a specialist in SHIELD, who happened to have someone to protect only a few feet away from him, and he made a weapon out of the closest thing he could feasibly use to do deadly harm.

* * *

Skye could've betrayed them and yet she hadn't. It had been sketchy for a moment there, a little touch-and-go, where he was prepared to call her his enemy as quickly as he would his ally – but then she came through for them, like a small part of him had hoped she would, and he and Coulson were on the premises and safe from the guards sending bullets whizzing right into the force field.

He didn't want to send her in. It was against his professional opinion, both as her SO and as what SHIELD tactfully called a _specialist._ Skye didn't have the skillset, the experience, the readiness. Ian Quinn was bad news. There was a good man's life on the line. There were tons of people there who weren't to blame for the kidnap or for the murder of several SHIELD agents. Skye was crafty, he would give her that, but she wasn't prepared for someone like Quinn. Sometimes, he didn't think she was even quite ready to be around people like himself and May.

There was no laughter when he found her, soaking wet, hair messy and tangled and streaking water down the back of her pink dress, which clung to her thighs and hugged her upper body tightly. There was fear on her face and panic in the way she ran as if she could fly if she just pushed herself fast enough.

Ward defended her without a second thought, knocking out several armed guards, one of them with their own weapon, and more than one ended up falling, unconscious, into the water. Well, that was their problem. He took Skye by the shoulders, did a cursory check on her, and deemed that there were no bones sticking out of her and no blood staining her fragile skin pink, so she wasn't in immediate danger.

"I'm okay," she gasped, grabbing onto his arms when he touched her, out of breath and still terrified, and he wondered what he'd missed while he hadn't been able to listen in to her communication device.

"You're fine," he told her firmly so that she would believe it.

Skye started to nod and he let her go – they still had a doctor to save and Quinn to stop – but later on, after the danger was stopped and all of the, ahem, _evidence_ was safely stored with means much more secure than a lock and key, he heard from Fitzsimmons everything that he'd missed – how Skye had been caught, how she'd taken the gun (in the way that he'd taught her, so she really _was_ paying attention when he spoke), and then how she'd jumped out the window and into the swimming pool instead of taking a kill shot.

"Good," he said to himself, and when both scientists canted their heads in an eerily-similar way, he explained with something that wasn't the full truth. "She probably would've missed had she tried. She's got a long ways to go yet."

Simmons frowned at him and Fitz enthusiastically praised Skye yet again, distracting the biochemist, and before Ward realized what he'd missed, he understood that Skye had officially won their favor and allegiance. They were friends. She had a place on the Bus, with the team. Maybe the olive branch she'd extended had been for the best.

And he still hadn't had to apologize for the way they met. Where would he have even started, anyway? Most people didn't typically make friends with the people that wrapped black bags over their heads and hauled them into a militarized aircraft.

* * *

Ward didn't like to rely on people. He liked to do things himself – cleanly, efficiently, and most importantly, reliably. He never would have to worry if he was double-crossing himself, if he was doing the wrong thing. Well, he supposed he could do the latter, but if that were the case, then he'd probably be doing it on accident, and accidents like that tended to get an agent killed before they had the chance to look back in hindsight.

Wearing the glasses made him feel a little silly, but he'd worn them for disguises before and he'd lived with it. The hardest part by far (not that he'd admit it) was not looking at anything indicative of his real identity. He wasn't Amador, and just the wrong impulsive glance would give that away. He couldn't even look at the woman behind him because then the controller would know something was wrong, much less make a mistake that would transmit an image of his reflection or any part of his body. Reflections were everywhere when you had to avoid them, and he was ever more conscious of his hands, especially. He and Amador were different sexes, different races… all it would take was one little glance.

His hand twitched against his leg, hidden from Skye's view, and he balled his fingers up in a loose fist, steading himself to go into play.

The glasses were like a shield, in a way. He knew that he could take them off and the effects would be gone. The earpiece, having Skye's voice in his ear, helped, as well. He tried to imagine being in Amador's position, forced to do things she never would've wanted to do, unable to have a moment of privacy, constantly aware of the presence watching through her eyes… and the way that typed words would show up in midair, to the bottom left of his vision, was disconcerting. It wasn't a nice use of his imagination.

Skye wasn't professional. She made comments about things he already knew ("Don't look at me!" and the warning exclamation of "Reflection!" were clearly some of her favorites), made an unappreciated remark about his 'man hands,' and started trying to talk about something completely off-topic. She was nervous. If something went wrong, he was in danger, too. Amador's kill switch would be flipped, and someone might shoot him.

Her off-topic, self-distracting speech and attitude wasn't as annoying as it used to be, and for that reason, he was a little irritated with himself. He was supposed to be immune to her charms.

He felt the immunity coming back in full swing when she told him to 'bromance' a security guard, laughed her ass off where she was hiding in the van, and alternated between giving him tips and mocking at him for his lacking people skills. She was a lot harder to get along with when she was getting on his nerves. Ward realized it wasn't working, gave up, and knocked the guard unconscious for access. Which, he might add, was no easy feat, since he had to be careful not to catch a glimpse of his own limbs at any point during the scuffle.

Then came the chase, and the gunshots, and accidentally looking in a mirror that was most inconveniently placed in a completely unnecessary location, mounted on a wall that he happened to turn to as he was fleeing, and the messages in the corner stopped coming, and he hoped that Fitzsimmons had figured out how to get the poison out of Amador, but he didn't have the time to stop and ask because he was busy running, escaping out to where Skye waited, getaway vehicle positioned to peel out of the parking lot the moment he vaulted himself into the van.

Later, Skye mocked his attempts at friendship-seducing the guard, using false voices and putting on a show for Fitzsimmons and Coulson, who happened to be leaning against the doorway. Ward scowled at her back and muttered that his voice wasn't that low or that nasally. Amador was safe, but they'd lost their most likely lead, and he'd been a victim, just like Amador had been, so really they knew nothing new but had lost an innocent life because Coulson made the mistake of showing his badge. It had been a rough day for all of them, and if Skye needed to poke fun at him so that she could sleep at night and pretend not to be affected by the horrors she was forced to see… his feelings weren't so sensitive that he couldn't take it.

* * *

He'd thought she was different, but she wasn't. She lied, she snuck out, and was cornered by May, sleeping with another Rising Tide member. She hadn't given up her affiliations for the team, just learned to conceal them better.

Ward told himself that he was only upset because of her dishonesty to the team that took her in and that it had nothing to do with feeling personally betrayed. He almost believed it. It wasn't just Coulson's approval that she'd have to win back – it was his trust, which was limited and given out in small amounts at a time at great discretion.

Skye called their "talented" kidnapping victim a human dragon, then smushed the words together and looked around for approval, only to look downcast when she didn't get any. Ward felt satisfied – smug, even – that he wasn't the only one angry with her.

The case was a disappointment. Their good guy went bad and their good girl could no longer be trusted. Ward personally thought she should've been forced off of the team, but recognized that he wasn't the authority, and he didn't want to seem like he cared enough to give an opinion. He'd have been a little disappointed to see her go. She'd been coming along as a trainee, shaping up a bit under his guidance, and every decent SO took pride in their students' burgeoning abilities.

He tried not to notice her as much when Coulson let her stay. It was that or to be angry, and despite popular notions, Ward didn't like being angry when he had personal attachments. Yet another reason he preferred working alone – not only was there less capacity for betrayal, but there wasn't the vulnerability or risk of any such attachments. So he pretended that Skye didn't bother him, that she wasn't there, that she was someone else who just happened to look like the brunette hacktivist.

To do this, he had to ignore Skye's numerous attempts at getting back in his good graces. None of those strides were as effective as the first time he saw the silver metal bracelet around her right wrist. He knew she'd see it as degrading, a sort of collar, but it would keep her in line and prevent her from getting back with her old boyfriend again, although it seemed as though Miles had burned that bridge well enough on his own for Ward not to have to think about it.

He wasn't as much "Rising Tide" as he was "personal gain with political agenda," and Skye wasn't impressed.

But then, Skye wasn't as much "learning and rehabilitating" as she was "getting close to win trust," according to what she was saying to Miles and how she'd behaved most recently, so Ward wasn't exactly thrilled with her, either, and although he never imagined his teammates when he boxed a punching bag, he may have worked out a little – or a lot – more vigorously for the next few weeks.

* * *

By the time Ward felt somewhat inclined to give Skye another chance, it had only been after she'd been well into her second chance from the rest of the team. Even Fitzsimmons were learning to get over their hurt feelings from Skye's traitorous actions and now were rooting for her to make up with her SO. _They must be kidding,_ Ward huffed when he overheard them as he passed by the lab.

Skye still seemed to know how to get under his skin, and it was infuriating. As soon as he let her under his skin again, she burrowed down like a tick. He dragged his hands over his face while no one was looking after Skye made a joke in bad taste about the traumatized children who'd seen their scout leader's dead body suspended in midair and smiled to herself.

Skye knew some about the Chitauri, but she hadn't been in New York at the time, so there were some parts of the story she wasn't as familiar with. She did remember the Chitauri, though, and she remembered Loki letting them rain hell down on Earth for the brief time it took for the Avengers to put a stop to it. Had Simmons not told her, in no uncertain terms, that the alien helmet was dangerous and not to be touched, Ward didn't doubt that Skye would've tapped at it with her manicured fingernails with a look of complete fascination while she made a mental compilation of all of the sci-fi references she could think of.

It was sad that the second firefighter died. Really, it was. Ward had learned early on that compartmentalizing was a skill he would desperately need if he ever expected to survive in his line of work, but Skye's eyes were leaking a few tears when they stood in respectful silence for the man who had just died, whose body was undoubtedly hovering about six feet high in an empty kitchen.

Ward wasn't one for comfort, but he took to staying by Skye for a couple of hours under the guise of protecting her and keeping the team composed. He felt like he had to do _something_ , since he hadn't been able to protect the victim, even when they'd found him alive, and so it was either to assure himself Skye wasn't going to sob into her pillow or reassure Coulson that it wasn't his fault, but May had already taken the latter job onto her own shoulders, and people like them – like Grant Ward and Melinda May, that is – weren't up for redundancies.

Watching her tear up made him wish that he could've done something, which was… new. Usually, when someone else makes him uncomfortable, he wants them to stop. With Skye, he feels grateful for that she expresses herself this way, wears her heart on her sleeve. It's reassuring to have her intentions and her feelings out in the open, where she's not hiding parts of herself, not holding back. And he feels better considering trusting her again when he sees how much she values human life. It's a refreshing change of pace from his own jaded view. Skye hasn't been entirely disillusioned or desensitized, not like Ward has.

He questions sometimes if she realizes why he's such a good trainer, such a skilled fighter. Did she ever think about the violent experience his hands had with combat? The same hands that defended her were accustomed to inflicting a kind of pain Skye rarely saw, hidden away in her crowded van with her computers and electronics, watching the world through screens.

He's the one to make the joke this time, and it's quiet and understated and not a big deal, but as he walks her to her bunk to get some rest after the stressful day, reminding her that this is life and sometimes they can't fix everything or save everyone, he slips in a Harry Potter reference about levitation that internally makes him sigh and roll his eyes and die a little bit on the inside.

It's worth it for the way her face changes, her mind taken off the idea of undeserved torment and loss of life. Instead of seeming shocked and dull, a grin stretches both sides of her mouth and she's prodding at his arm, pestering him about how her cool, composed SO just made a joke.

"I didn't know you even knew what they were!" She gaped at him with a teasing light in her eyes that Ward realized he had missed seeing, just a little bit.

* * *

Some intense action started going on while he was elsewhere, and by the time he knew something was wrong with Simmons, it was too late to do anything. It was too late to do anything an hour before that, though, and something had been wrong for more than a day already.

Around the time that he saw a soaking wet hacker run for her life after staying loyal to their team, Ward realized that maybe it wasn't too bad to work with a group. A small, closely-knit group, at that. He wasn't going to be winning any socialization awards – as Commander Hill had suggested with her porcupine drawing on his file – but if there were two things he understood, then they were protection and loyalty.

Loyalty: the complete unwillingness to turn away from his team for the sake of personal gain. When he looked down certain death from Ian Quinn's guards, he could've shot them and made a run for it. He was professionally capable of pulling it off. Instead, he put himself in harm's way to cover Coulson and rescue Skye from the midst of the estate.

Protection: he recognized that he was the best fighter, rivalled only by May. Defending himself was common sense. Defending others? Not so much. But little had made him angrier in the last several weeks than watching someone hurt his teammates, and especially fragile little Skye and Fitzsimmons, and he'd privately resigned himself to that, for as long as they had his back, he had theirs. Most of the time, that meant being prepared to smash a beer bottle on someone's hand at a moment's notice, or drop-kick someone off of a pier, or shoot with honed accuracy to injure the threat but not leave so much as a mark on his teammate.

(Other times, it meant scolding Fitz. Fitz wasn't his biggest fan, and Ward knew that Fitz thought he was mean and cold sometimes, but he wasn't lecturing the engineer to be a jerk. He did it because the more Fitz understood, the safer he'd be. Knowledge is power.)

Today, though, protection meant leaping out of an airplane more than thirty thousand feet above the Atlantic, skydiving with his parachute still closed for more than twenty thousand of those feet, and landing with a splash in the freezing cold waters until Coulson could contact the nearest ship on their radio.

He took Jemma Simmons to Fitz first, reuniting the two lab rats. (Given that they'd used rats to test antidotes, and kept accidentally killing them, he winced and decided to stop calling them that.) The best friends shook in each other's arms, and that was when Skye came running in, looking from drenched and teary-eyed Simmons to Ward, who feigned boredom as he waited for the greetings to dissipate. He had just jumped out of an airplane. The biochemist needed to hear three very important words from him: _that was stupid._ Then he patted her upper back and took a towel to dry off his hair.

After Skye embraced Simmons like she'd just watched her sister try to commit suicide (which Simmons practically had), she let go and surveyed the other brunette in awe, swiping tears away from her eyes before they had the chance to fall, fingernails pressing into her cheeks. Simmons responded in kind and they hugged again, Fitz standing to the side and wringing his hands in the hem of his shirt, waiting for his turn to take Simmons back.

Ward had been the hero. Again. Usually it was just par for the course – he did actions, he kicked some rear ends, and he went to bed thinking about the next mission. He was glad to have been fast enough to save his friend but didn't care to rehash the details or dwell on it. It had been done. It was time to move on.

The specialist began to reconsider his stance when Skye slowly walked to him and wrapped her arms around his middle, sinking in against his chest with a sigh. His still-damp clothes left stains of wetness on her shirt, but the woman didn't care. Ward didn't know if Skye was hugging him out of relief that he was alive or out of gratitude for saving Simmons, but he didn't care, either, just held an arm around her back.

"Just you wait, Rookie. You'll be learning to jump out of planes in no time if you keep up with your training. Five thirty warm-ups tomorrow morning."

Skye didn't like him as much when he took away her sleeping time, and she pushed herself away from him with pouty lips and a scowl that didn't cover the rest of her face. Ward almost wanted to hug her again. He also almost wanted to go back to not talking to her, because at least then he hadn't been asking himself why he wanted to get all touchy-feely with a girl he barely knew.

* * *

Fitz was alright, but he was no specialist when it came to field work. Fitz did his best stuff in the lab. Ward could admit that he was nearly useless in a lab setting, so it wasn't to do with pride or dislike. It was the tactical acknowledgement of one's strengths, and their lack thereof in other areas.

When Ward was assigned to do a quick mission in a hostile territory, he assumed he'd be going with May. May would've been his first choice – calm, quick-witted, and fierce. She was not someone Ward would ever choose to pick a fight with. But he had his orders, and the bosses had been very clear that Fitz was necessary, so there they were, in a heavy-duty sleeping bag that blended in with the sandy ground around them, early dawn rising over the skyline, an engineer wrapped around one of his arms like a koala.

Ward sighed irritably for the sixth or seventh time, shifted his body, pillowed his head with his free arm, and glanced down at Fitz, who looked uncomfortable but was still unconscious. Fitz fell asleep with as much space between himself and the other man as possible, but evidently that had changed while they'd both lightly dozed through the few hours of break they had managed to steal.

He was reasonably certain that May wouldn't have been clinging to him, had she been the one with him.

It would've been alright if it were Simmons, he reasoned, then swallowed against a dry throat. _Or Skye._ The women were capable of taking care of themselves, for the most part, but Ward still liked to keep tabs on them and know that his people weren't in danger. They weren't as annoying as Fitz. Skye had so much talent at getting on his nerves that she should probably be getting medals for it, but she bothered him in a way that Fitz didn't, and, all things considered, Simmons and he got along well enough that he wouldn't have minded sharing a sleeping bag with her.

Not that he minded with Fitz. It was purely professional, and Fitz was a nice guy. It was just the invasion of personal space that was getting to him. It was hot, even with the sun barely beginning to peek up, and they were already hiding in a thick sleeping bag. He didn't need a human to add more body heat into the equation, and yet there he was.

Ward shut his eyes and listened intently, taking slow and deep breaths while he let the engineer catch up on his sleep. He was of no use to anyone without his strength up, and he had promised Coulson that he'd take care of the Scotsman.

Inevitably, his mind wandered back towards Skye. It was infuriating that he had so little control over his own thought processes where she was concerned, but it was relaxing to think of her and wonder what she was up to in the safety of the SHIELD headquarters. The pretty brunette – _did he just think of her as pretty?_ – was probably utilizing her long hours of practice pestering Ward to her advantage, drawing on those experiences to nag at Coulson until she was given information that she didn't have the security clearance to access. Her own nosiness was going to be a danger to her at some point, and Ward wasn't looking forward to the day that that came.

He turned his head back down to look into Fitz's hair, and for just a split-second, he was convinced that he was actually looking down on long waves of brown, and he started to flex his forearm to move. When he felt Fitz unconsciously hold tighter, he could feel the difference between Skye's small, soft hands and the engineer's larger, stronger, and more calloused fingers, and then Skye wasn't there, and it was just him and Fitz.

Another sigh escaped his lips. It was going to be a long mission, and an even longer night once they got back to the Bus. He hated to admit it, but he missed his trainee.

* * *

Waving his hand in front of the flashlight beam, Ward narrowed his eyes, squinted, and stared, seeking out any sort of response signal. Fitz pressed his thermal window to the stone wall and ignored Ward completely as the specialist tried again. _Still, no answer._ He turned off his flashlight before it could attract attention.

Something had gone wrong. There was supposed to be a team up in that direction, watching for their signal to communicate their position and their time to the aerial extraction team. Fitz and Ward were supposed to be picked up and cleared from the area before the SHIELD agents assigned for their force factor would come and apprehend the separatists.

He opted not to tell Fitz at first, instead slipped inside, took out the men standing guard before they could sound the alarm, and fetched the engineer.

Time was running out. He could feel it in the same way that he could feel his heart beat, the same way that he could tell when someone was going to attack him from behind. Ward watched Fitz dismantle the incredibly dangerous weapon right in front of them, but he didn't know what Fitz was doing, what any of the wires were supposed to represent (above his pay grade – hence why he had half of the Fitzsimmons duo), or if there was anything he could do to help, so his thoughts slipped momentarily to HQ.

What had happened to the plan? Had their fellow agents already been caught? Captured, or executed? Had SHIELD been attacked? – Or, more likely (because SHIELD was the kind of organization that had a plan B through plan E when something unexpected happened), there was never _meant_ to be an extraction, and that was why there was no response to his signal.

He swallowed back his feelings as he watched Fitz work, keeping watch to defend the smaller male from armed rogues. He had done things that risked his life many times before, and Fitz knew the risks of coming into the field, yet they had both made their decisions. Having the right to informed choices taken away from them… that rubbed Ward in all the wrong ways. He was loyal to the end. He'd have died several times on missions they'd given him if it weren't for some stroke of luck or last-minute backup or a sudden realization of how he could turn the tables in his advantage. He might have still come, had he known the truth. Fitz might not have, but that was okay. Their plan would've been different. Ward would've probably tried, but he would've tried it differently, tried to find a way that offered him better odds of survival.

Hand had lied to them, and Ward wasn't the only one who was going to pay for it. As he looked down at the Scotsman, who bit his tongue between his teeth, brow furrowed in dedicated concentration while sweat ran down his throat, the fighter realized that he had to give Fitz a fighting chance. He'd promised it to Coulson. Fitz didn't deserve this – this wasn't the kind of work he'd ever signed on for, and Ward had a lot of enemy blood on his hands, but blood nonetheless, so there was no reason why he shouldn't try to ride it out, put the odds against himself a little bit if it helped Fitz get back to Simmons. He didn't want to take one of Skye's friends away from her, either, even though it was hardly his fault if they were both killed.

For what could've been the last time, he recalled his rookie and her bright smiles and happy squeals when she hit the target spot-on using the pistol she'd been given, her mouthy attitude and refusal to take no for an answer, her adamant belief that everyone needed a shoulder. Something about not having one for herself made her want to give hers to everyone on the team. Ward couldn't personally understand it, but he appreciated it, admired the hugeness and compassion of her heart.

Maybe if things had been different, he'd have told her someday.

He tried to convince Fitz to go and save himself, and he wasn't ashamed to admit that he brought up Simmons and her inevitable heartbreak as motivation, but that just made his partner angrier and more defiant, so after several attempts, he had to admit defeat. If the idiot wanted to die out here, then that was his prerogative.

* * *

Ward saw himself as the protector in most cases, but in this instance, he didn't even realize he was the one being protected until Skye vaulted into his arms and started babbling about how she was so glad he was okay and _ugh, that_ was the sort of plan that had made her join the Rising Tide. She was so sorry for what had almost happened – for what would have happened, had she not saved him – and gracefully skirted around the part where she broke very strict rules to satisfy her concerns, only to reveal that there was never an extraction plan on the books. Or in the computers. Or anywhere, for that matter, and she took it into her own hands to see to it that her SO was rescued in one piece.

It had been a long time – maybe it had never even happened before – since anyone had done something so reckless, so dumb, and so self-jeopardizing for his sake, and not for the first time, Ward wondered to himself if he liked her because of her good intentions for everyone or if it was because he felt important when he was with her. Skye made him feel like he couldn't be replaced.

He was glad now that she hadn't been assigned to sneak past the separatists with him, but still found himself lying in his bunk the next night, oddly curious what it might feel like to have her body curled in against his, cheek against his shoulder and hair tickling at his chin.

He may have found the exception to his status as a porcupine.


End file.
